Raid testing and beta patch notes

Good afternoon lads and lasses! Welcome back to another of our beta reads. With fresh raid testing under our belt (the last ones were in the first week of May), we need to share some updates. The most recent raid testing took place on Friday the 17th and Monday the 20th of June. On top of that, this morning a patch hit the beta realms with an abundance of patch notes to dig through. Let’s get started!

Oh hello cloudburst

We made it crystal clear before. We don’t like cloudburst totem. We do our main testing in raids, and that means that until this Friday our opinions were over a month and a half old. Making it easy to miss some of the fun people were having with this talent meanwhile. So now you may wonder, what changed? How did cloudburst go from the worst of the worst, to the best. Even now that it is competing with echo?

Cloudburst today on live (Warlords) is clunky. It will collect all healing spells (and their multistrikes) for 15 seconds. After that it distributes 20% of healing done while it was active, equally amongst all injured allies within 40 yards. To clarify, it collect all effective healing done by direct healing spells. This means your healing wave, your healing surge and your chain heal, but not your totems like healing stream and healing tide. Making it similar to the current working of ascendance to the degree that only direct healing spells are affected. Once the healing is collected and the stored healing is released, it heals injured allies and distributes evenly. This means that if half the raid is not full hp, and 2 are extremely injured, ten players will be healed for a little bit. Resulting in mostly overhealing and only two semi effective heals. Adding the fact that overhealing is not counted during the charging up period of the totem, it is losing even more potential. All of this together made cloudburst no match for high tide in warlords.

So what changed?

In the early alpha, cloudburst was put on the same tier with bottomless depths and ancestral guidance. At least, that is how it was patched together by sites like Mmo-champion and Wowhead. At that point we could see it becoming viable given the competition it had. After that, Blizzard released a talent tree putting ancestral guidance on a different tier and matching cloudburst with bottomless depths and echo of the elements. Different story. Echo was still strong at this point, and cloudburst still clunky. And that’s when it happened. Somewhere in between raid testing, a bunch of guys went into dungeons and started producing giant cloudburst numbers. As new raid testing occurred, we had to try this out for ourselves. On the boss Krosus (AoE healing dream) this is what Keehn did:

Yeah.. so that happened. Some words of encouragement for struggling resto shamans out there. Notice how his overhealing is under 19%? Your time is coming: god-mode moments are about to arrive. There’s nothing like the start of an expansion for a resto shaman. Soon you’ll be able to breathe, to unleash the elements. Ok Dorelei, I get that you’re excited, but can we see a break down of these numbers? Sure you can! If you want to dig through these logs yourself, then you can find them right here. Disclaimer: obviously we chose a very shaman friendly fight and pull. This is by no means the number display in all scenario’s.

Our point is, cloudburst is strong. Don’t mind healing tide in this example though, for that we need some different logs. Let’s examine why cloudburst is so strong right now. First of all, it stores more healing (30%), secondly it stores overhealing (big one). Still overhealing is not mana efficient, nor does it benefit from your mastery, but it is a big change from not counting at all. Thirdly, it benefits from ancestral guidance. All these factors make for a very strong talent.

In the distance there is a faint echo

Echo, on the other hand, got nerfed a few weeks ago and got nerfed again today. There is nothing left of it. It is now a remnant of its glorious past. The change logs today read:

Echo of the Elements (Restoration) In addition, when you cast Healing Wave, Healing Surge, Riptide, or Chain Healconsume a charge of Tidal Waves, you have a 10% chance to generate a charge of Riptide.

They really don’t want us using this talent anymore. That is pretty obvious. So what else changed?

There seems to be generic buffing of raid cooldowns, and some balancing of direct heal power. It is interesting to see how much love tranquility gets, considering it was already a very strong cooldown. Worst case scenario: we will have to bribe a priest to leap the druid mid-tranq.

Did you spot more changes to the resto shaman? Let us know in the comments!

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meesh

#729

I feel like cloudburst can be awkward on some fights, especially if it results in over healing due to bad timing. You say Krosus is aoe heavy yes? That makes cloudburst seem appealing for sure. Because the more aoe healing we do while its up the stronger it becomes right. How difficult is it to time a good cloud burst, or do shamans use it on cd and it works its own magic? I tried it briefly in a LFR but the boss and group was so bad I quickly switched talents to be more effective. (fight was Botanist)

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2 years ago

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griesch

#653

I´m happy to see cloudburst totem being useful. But it seems from my experience it´s only worth taking in raids and not in dungeons at least heroics. But interesting is that from what i tested cloudburst totem ofc does not soak the healing from your HST but has a synergy with Queen’s Decree.

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